Tag Archives: Computer Games

Over the last couple of days I’ve been playing a lot of Paradox Interactive’s Stellaris. For those who haven’t heard of it, it’s a galaxy spanning real-time strategy game that is absolutely loaded with random events and AI interactions. These random events and the scenarios it throws up make the game ripe for making self-created narratives in your head.

I started playing it in May, and had some great laughs with a ruler who became addicted to drugs and in doing so accidentally became immortal (I’ve generally been assuming that it’s Melange.) A few weeks back a patch was released that made a lot of my older games incompatible, so I started a new one. I came back to it this weekend to help take my mind off things happening in the real world. (For those following me on twitter you’ll already know that this wasn’t exactly a success.) After two days of almost solid gameplay I stopped for the evening and promptly wrote 2,000 words about the crazy nonsense which had been unfolding. I’ve interspersed the story with some edits of screenshots I took as the game was unfolding. I hope you enjoy it.

I have not done a lot of writing over the last few weeks. Recently the looming spectre of computer games has sunk its claws into my being and has stubbornly refused to let go. I’ve whiled away hour after hour amidst stealthy cyber-punk infiltration and corporate espionage; I’ve lost whole afternoons to pixelated mining; I’ve lost days to simulated space violence. I don’t regret any of this, I don’t feel too guilty about it. It was jolly good fun. But a man has obligations, a man has his patterns. This post is being hastily knocked together in the scant few moments I have before bed, with a hastily prepared dinner cooking in the oven. So in lieu of anything else to say I have delved into a back catalogue of wordascopes which are yet to see the light of day.